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For the first time in its nine-year history, the annual meeting of the International Conference on Greek Linguistics will be hosted stateside, and the University of Chicago Department of Linguistics is proud to be the first American host for this important gathering!

The conference will take place on campus in the International House (on 59th Street) from October 29-31. Registration is free for ALL students, and talks (and Halloween candy!) should be plentiful.

Second-year student Rebekah Baglini presented her paper “Modeling Variation and Change in Raddoppiamento Sintattico” at the Fifteenth Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology (McWOP) at Indiana University last Sunday, October 11.

Alice Lemieux‘s paper “Small but significant: Body part incorporation in Washo” has been accepted for presentation at the 15th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA), Feb. 5-7 2010, in Ottawa, Ontario.

Linguistics faculty memberKarlos Arregiwill present “The Syntax of Comparative Numerals” at NELS 40, to be held at MIT November 13-15.

Slavic/Linguistics joint-Ph.D. student Andrew Dombrowski will be giving a paper entitled “On Vowel Contraction in Macedonian” at the 7th Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies, which will be held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, November 5-8. He will also participate in a roundtable entitled “Macedonian Language Contact – from Linguistic League to Diaspora” at the national convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), in Boston from November 12 – 15. Slavic faculty member Victor Friedman is likewise scheduled to give papers at the MNACMS and AAASS, as well as AATSEEL and a special conference on linguistic minorities in Turkey and Turkish minorities outside Turkey at the University of Cyprus.

Did you know the average professor publishes 0.7 journal articles per year? That’s what we hear, anyway. Our department chair Chris Kennedy, however, just had an entire paper (coauthored with Jason Stanley at Rutgers) come out in the philosophy journal Mind. Congratulations!

Ph.D. student Jackie Bunting, currently ABD, has received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation. She’ll spend three months in Suriname conducting fieldwork for her thesis, entitled “English to Sranan: An Assessment of Structural Similarities and Differences,” starting on October 18th. Hope you have an enjoyable, fruitful trip!

Also this year, Thomas Wier is continuing his Fulbright-Hayes fieldwork documenting dying Georgian dialects/languages, looking for evidence of different kinds of morphological blocking processes. While abroad, he has also given two talks: (1) The Case In and Across Languages conference in Helsinki, Finland: “Morphosemantax and case-marking in Georgian” and (2) The Tbilisi Forum on Language and Logic, in Bakuriani, Georgia, where he spoke about “Nonconfigurationality in Georgian.”

With Şerife Geniş. Formation of a Diasporic Community: The History of Migration and Resettlement of Muslim Albanians in the Black Sea Region of Turkey. Middle Eastern Studies. Volume 45: 4: 553-569.

Meanwhile, here is a photo from Kelly’s summer jaunts:

Kelly makes friends with a Swedish runestone

She explains: “The stone is two fragments of a 10th century runestone fromSigtuna, Sweden that have been re-attached.According to a nearby plaque, translated into English it reads, ‘Sven had this stone set up in memory of his father and Frödis in memory of her husband Ulv. God help his soul.’The script employed is the younger futhark, popular in Scandanvian stone carving between 800-1100.One way you can tell it’s the younger runes is by looking at the rune by the knuckles in my right hand near the crack.It is a vertical line with two horizontal lines going all the way across.This is the rune for [o].”